Luckily I have been out of the game while a lot of this was going on and it appears that it has been going on since '06. I'm sure that all of you have realized that this guy isn't 16 years old. If he was that would have made him 14 when he started. Anyway just a tad bit of input. I think there is a issue with this using someone else's whois info. In the past couple of months I've received transfer requests myself on names I've never owned. And I might add they were pretty decent names. I've likely dumped the emails by now but going to look back through them and do little digging if I can.
Also as far as package drop-off. It is very common in these types of scams to have packages dropped off at locations that aren't associated with the scammer. It's assumed this is an apartment complex. Well if you think about it many apartment complexes have empty apartments. The delivery guy isn't likely to know this so he/she just drops the package off. Scammer knows the delivery time so he/she just sits and waits. This sort of thing also happens at empty houses.
And like others have stated we need to consider what we are doing when making transactions. There have been several people that have stated they "thought" it seemed fishy but went ahead any way. Maybe it's just because I'm not big on fish but when something smells fishy to me I don't eat it.
There should be no reason why someone can't divulge their information.
And last but not least and I hate to be the one to say this. But how long has the appraisal scams been going on? As long as I can remember. The "feds" have done nothing as far as I can tell about that. Or maybe appraisal scams and domain scam is one in the same? Either way this person is very domain savvy and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it turns out to be someone among us and like someone else said maybe even here at this very moment under another name. From my experience with a crooked individual in the past. He portrayed himself as an upstanding citizen but he did what he had to do to support his lavish and drug addicted lifestyle and that generally involved screwing people over. Funny thing about this fact is he was involved with one of these names.